Natural Language Processing for Chatbot Systems

Service oriented chatbot systems are used to assist customers find information on large complex websites. The service oriented chatbot acts as a virtual customer service representative, giving answers to natural language queries and offering more targeted information during the course of its conversation with the user.

Interaction between the user and the system happens via a chat window, similar to an instant messaging interface. HCI experiments show that these systems are well accepted by users; however, the level of expectation is quite high. The conversation needs to be as human-like as possible whilst also providing all of the relevant information. In order to produce the correct language and the correct behaviour it has been necessary to observe humans. This has led us to study in greater depth the interaction between humans in an online chat situation and humans and machines under the same circumstances. This project is being done in collaboration with Norwich Union.